Operating communication apparatuses or systems involves multiple steps.
For example to call a party or multiple parties, operator of a video conferencing apparatus needs to collect connection information for the video conferencing apparatus or apparatuses that belongs to other party. This may be phone number, ISDN number, IP address.
Once operator finds the address, operator needs to find other information like connection speed, protocols supported and compare it to local video conferencing apparatus capabilities to make sure conference call may happen between two apparatuses.
Sometimes operator makes a manual test call before the actual call to make sure everything works.
Some people might want to have technical people have available before and during the call to make sure call will go through and there are no problems during the call.
Sometimes it may be impossible to or hard the find all the info needed to make a conference call because each party may not have that information readily available or people who have the information may not be available to provide it.
The more the steps involved, the less likely may be the technology adoption and return on investment of such systems, and possible operator errors may increase.
Systems, apparatuses, methods to reduce the number of steps to achieve a certain intent and complexity have been introduced in the past.
For example use of directory systems is a way to improve usability of a system.
Certain systems, apparatuses may read and write certain data that is connected to an external database, like reading an address book from corporate servers and adding new addresses to that centralized corporate servers.
All these systems, apparatuses need some sort of manual input and has interoperability issues.